Python: the WHY, what and how
- GIS support (ESRI's ArcPy, QGIS, etc)
- General-purpose
- Great glue language
- Easy to learn
- Tons of great libraries
- Strong community
- Open Source
- Roots in education (STEM'y)
- Dynamically-typed
- Interpreted (CPython)
- Reference counted (CPython) vs garbage collected
- Some history
-
- IDE support not so great (Eclipse plugin, PyCharm and that's about it)
- BUT, you don't need an IDE
- Virtualenv (virtual python environments, allows for side-by-side standalone interpreters/sets of libraries)
- Nose (unit test runner)
- IPython notebooks (best REPL yet)
- Quite a few interpreters, CPython, PyPy, JPython (JVM), Iron Python (.NET)
- Comes with ALL distributions of Linux
Python: the WHY, what and how @joemeilinger
